John Danner, the cofounder of Rocketship Public Schools and now the founder of Flourish Schools, an emerging network of AI-native microschools, joined me and Diane to share what’s now possible when it comes to school design in the age of AI that wasn’t previously possible. John explained how Flourish is leveraging AI to deliver foundational skills like reading and math through conversational tutors to free up teachers to focus on building relationships and nurturing students' passions and "superpowers.” John pointedly explained how the conversational models can be much more powerful than previous edtech applications. He also talked about how Flourish is working to use AI to provide real-time assessment and feedback on student projects.
Diane Tavenner
Hey, Michael.
Michael Horn
Hey, Diane. It is good to see you again for our continuing conversations on AI.
Diane Tavenner
You too. This one’s going to be a fun one. You know, our most recent episode, we talked with Alpha School founder Mackenzie Price. Most people have heard of Alpha at this point. It’s getting a ton of attention. And so what we tried to do there was really move beyond the talking points and the marketing to really dig into the model itself, including specifically how they’re using AI, which is turning into a bit of our quest this season. And so this conversation today is a part of that exploration on who’s building what I would call maybe AI-native school models, if anyone. And, you know, what might they look like? What are they starting to look like? And it’s a really fun conversation today because we get to have a chat with an old friend.
Michael Horn
Yes, that is indeed correct, Diane. Today we’re going to get to chat with none other than John Danner. John, for those that don’t know him, has had a decorated career in tech before turning to education, as he co-founded and led NetGravity, the first ad server company, I believe. And after taking it public, selling it to DoubleClick, John went back to school and then became a teacher, and he taught in Nashville for a few years there. And then I think a lot of folks know him because he co-founded, of course, Rocketship Public Schools in 2006, which we, of course, talked about also in our last episode. But Rocketship was a buzzy school for a good while there, marked by its student outcomes, its use of technology, its expansion. And then after leaving Rocketship in 2013, John did a number of other things, including founding an online math tutoring company, creating some very interesting education investment vehicles and more. But I want to skip ahead to his most recent venture, Flourish Schools, which is what we’re going to hear about today.
Michael Horn
So, John, hopefully I did some justice to the bio, but, welcome. It is always good to see you.
John Danner
Thank you, Michael. Great to see both of you. Long time.
Michael Horn
This is going to be fun. This is going to be fun. So let’s start with grounding our audience. My assumption is that a lot of folks know Rocketship and what you did there. Far fewer know about the Flourish Schools model itself and what these schools actually look like. So maybe give us the basics, like what is Flourish Schools, how many of them are there today, how big are they, what’s the grade levels, what does a day in a student’s life look like at these schools? You know, paint the picture for us.
John Danner
Yeah, yeah. So we started Flourish about a year ago. We opened our first school last August. In Nashville, one microschool so far. They’re middle schools, so grades 6 through 8. I’m out in Phoenix today. We’re opening a couple more schools in Phoenix next year, next August. And I’d say the reason for doing it, you know, Diane knows this well, like doing schools is quite difficult work.
Enhancing Foundational Learning with AI
John Danner
I often prefer being on the software side where, you know, life is good. But, you know, schools are hard work and sometimes you have to do them. I think the big motivator in starting Flourish for me was that I had started a couple of AI companies, Project Read, probably the most notable doing reading, which is in a lot of classrooms. And I just noticed that most schools are using AI in a very supplemental way right now, very much the same way they used edtech. And that bothered me because, you know, in reading, for example, I think there’s a pretty good argument that AI for reading is going to be better than the best human reading teacher within the next year or two. It’s not a long way off at all because teaching reading is really hard. Training teachers to teach that is hard. It’s hard to be patient with kids when they’re making lots of mistakes.
And it’s hard to remember everything a kid has ever done when they’re reading with you, right? All of which just is default for AI. So, you know, in watching Project Read roll out and seeing everybody kind of use it, you know, in those last 15 minutes in the class when they were kind of, you know, a kid was done with the assignment and needed to do something else. Like, I was like, you know, that doesn’t seem like how AI should, affects schools. It should be used more strategically. You know, what can AI do, and therefore what do you do with teacher time? I think, you know, for me, teacher time has always been kind of the scarce resource. It’s like whatever teachers focus on is really what schools do. No matter what schools talk about, it’s like, okay, what, what are your teachers doing? That’s what’s going to have the most impact. And so Flourish we, we started with the assumption that what we call foundations, kind of the basic skills, reading, writing, math, are going to be better taught by AI.
The way we kind of look at it is if you think of like Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 instruction, it’s really the move from technology as a Tier 2 or Tier 3 product to a Tier 1. So, you know, can you use AI to do kind of tier 1 basic skills and standards-based instruction? And so that was what we did from day 1 at Flourish. We’re 6 months into it now. I would say the lesson learned is, of course, you’re going to have students in any school that like, you know, whatever. We have several special ed, several ELL students they need more time and attention. But during our foundations block, which is an hour long, teachers have time to work with them one-on-one. And a teacher working with a student one-on-one on reading or whatever is like a luxury that like no other school has because that you can’t have them doing that. But when all the other kids are making great progress with AI, having a teacher spend that time, that luxurious time is actually possible.
